A
SPECIAL THREE-PART HISTORY of the RAF's brilliant attack
on the Ruhr Dams in May 1943, immortalised by the film
The Dambusters. These articles have been written on the
basis of interviews and released official British and
German documents, arid particularly on the private papers
and diaries of Barnes Wallis -- the British scientist who
invented the unique "bouncing bomb" that smashed the
dams.

Picture: David Irving
interviews Sir Arthur Harris in 1962

Judge Gray on David
Irving: "As a military
historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of
military history Irving has undertaken thorough and
painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered
and disclosed to historians and others many documents which,
but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for
years. It was plain from the way in which he conducted his
case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating
cross-examination that his knowledge of World War 2 is
unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical
documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and
intelligent. He was invariably quick to spot the
significance of documents which he had not previously seen.
Moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid
style. I accept the favourable assessment by Professor Watt
and Sir John Keegan of the calibre of Irving's military
history and reject as too sweeping the negative
assessment of [Regius Professor of History Richard
"Skunky"] Evans.

ILOT OFFICER ANTHONY BURCHER, Royal
Australian Air Force and twenty-one years old, lay in a
crumpled heap in the middle of what felt like a plowed
field. He opened his eyes, and saw the moon and
stars.

"Good God," he thought. "I'm still alive!" Echoing round
the valley he could hear the familiar sound of Lancaster
bomber engines. He wondered what had happened to his own
aircraft, M-Mother; not so many minutes ago, he had been
crouching in its rear gun-turret, watching the sheet of
water flash past sixty feet beneath him and the streams of
tracer shells streak by on either side.

He felt hungry. Instinctively, he thrust his hand inside
his blue polo neck sweater and felt for the bottle of
Horlicks tablets. His mother, back in Goulburn, Australia,
had heard that everybody in England was starving, and every
month she sent her boy Tony a supply of the tablets to keep
him going until he could return to the outback. His locker
back at Scampton was full of them. Hell, he was glad of the
impulse that had made him pick up a box of them on his way
over to the briefing hall.

The briefing hall . . . in a rush it all came back to
him. His Lancaster had been one of nineteen sent out by 617
Squadron with the task of destroying five vital barrage dams
that supplied the Ruhr arms factories with all their water.
M-Mother had been the second to attack the first target, the
biggest dam of them all -- the Moehne dam. But they had been
hit by flak and blown up, right over the dam, only about a
hundred and fifty feet up. How had he survived?

With a dull sense of inevitable disaster, Tony Burcher
realised that somewhere up the valley from where he lay,
there was the dam, which even now his comrades-in-arms were
trying to breach. In a few minutes he was going to get very
wet indeed, unless he could run. But his back felt as if it
were broken.

Man's instinct, if he has to die, is to die unseen. With
enormous difficulty Burcher dragged his broken body across
the field and hid in a culvert, where he lapsed back into
unconsciousness. And just a mile away from him the 23,000
souls in the little valley town of Neheim-Huesten waited in
their basements and air-raid shelters -- waited for sirens
to sound the All Clear, unaware that tonight the RAF was
attacking the dams above them.

THE BOMB DROPPED by M-Mother just before she blew up had
bounded right over the dam's parapet and crashed onto the
roof of the powerhouse below it. Smoke from the burning
building mingled with the spray thrown up by the earlier
detonations on the lake side of the dam, and obscured the
whole target area. It was some minutes before Wing Commander
Guy Gibson felt it proper to continue the attack.

A few minutes after half-past midnight, he ordered Flight
Lieutenant Mick Martin to attack in P-Popsy, as Martin
unofficially dubbed his aircraft. The night air was still
heavy with spray, and this clung to the aircraft's
windscreens; at first Martin's bomb-aimer could not see the
target properly at all -- just the distant blurred glow of
M-Mother's wreckage burning in the hills about two miles
beyond the dam.

Even as the range closed to just over a mile, he could
see only one of the dam's two distinctive valve-towers
through the dense cloud of dust and smoke. He need to see
both to get the range right.

Wing Commander Gibson realised that Martin's only hope of
success was for the enemy gunners' attention to be
distracted. He switched on all his own aircraft's lights and
flew alongside P-Popsy, blazing away at the defences with
the dazzling 100-per-cent night-tracer in his guns.

Martin's bomb-aimer got a sight on both valve-towers only
at the very last moment. He pressed the bomb release, and
the special bomb skipped across the lake towards the dam.
The smoke did not seem to hamper the gunners at all, and
Martin felt his aircraft shudder as a row of 20-millimetre
cannon shells tore into his starboard outer fuel tank and
ailerons. A streak of fast vaporizing petrol shot out behind
the plane, but miraculously it didn't catch fire.

A huge waterspout shot up eight hundred feet into the air
as Martin's bomb exploded, but the range must have been
slightly midjudged as the base of the spout was not quite
centred on the dam. The giant blast wave hurled two of the
German gunners from their towers, and they lay senseless on
the crown of the dam.

Martin radioed Guy Gibson, "Okay -- attack
completed."

WHEN THE NEWS of this third unsuccessful attack reached the
Bomber Group's headquarters at Grantham, a clammy air of
extreme depression gripped the operations room. Barnes
Wallis, the special bomb's inventor, buried his head still
deeper in his hands so as to avoid the black looks of the
two air-marshals pacing up and down.

But the foreman of the Moehne powerhouse, Meister Clement
Koehler, could see something that none of the British airmen
could yet see. Koehler had got out of the power-house just
in time and was now sheltering beneath a larch-tree halfway
up the valley. And what he could see was this -- fine cracks
were forming, branching and spreading along the dam's
parapet, and silver jets of water were issuing from them,
glinting in the moonlight. He thought of his six nephews and
cousins asleep in their house by the sawmill down the valley
-- they never paid any attention to air-raid warnings; he
thought of the gamekeeper, old Wildening, and the thirty
old-age pensioners that he boarded; he thought of the
villages of Himmelpforten -- "The Gates of Heaven" and
Niederense and the town of Neheim-Huesten. Nothing could
save them now.

Again Gibson deliberately drew the enemy gunners' fire;
he flew his Lancaster up and down the valley on the dry side
of the dam with his landing lights blazing, taunting the
gunners and firing his guns at them.

Young got in his bomb run unhampered while the gunners'
backs were turned. Gibson thought that the bomb must have
been accurately placed, because the column of water was far
taller than after Mick Martin's attack.

Hundreds of tons of water slopped over the crest of the
dam, and Young shouted exuberantly, "I think I've done it,
I've broken it!" But as the spray cleared, Gibson saw that
the enormous wall of masonry was still intact -- but was his
imagination playing tricks, or had it bulged slightly since
the last two attacks?

With fresh confidence, he called up the fifth aircraft on
the radiotelephone, Flight Lieutenant Dave Maltby, and
ordered him in to attack.

Maitby's aircraft closed in fast. His bomb-aimer saw the
dam very early, and got good sightings on both valve-towers
when still two thousand feet away. In the centre of the dam,
there seemed to be something happening already -- Maltby
swung his aircraft to port a little. At the precise moment
that the towers lined up on the bomb-aimers's two sighting
wires he released the bomb.

It bounced three times, smacked into the dam's parapet
and settled, still spinning furiously, down the dam's
submerged face. At a depth of thirty feet, the charge went
off -- four tons of the most powerful explosive the British
had yet devised.

It looked perfect.

The dam was out of Gibson's sight for some minutes as he
careered his Lancaster round the valley; his windscreen was
still partly obscured by spray. But time was running out.
Certain that the fifth attack too had failed, he called up
the sixth, Dave Shannon, and told him to go in.

IN THE MEANTIME, between 12:50 and 12:55 a.m., the
Lancasters had radioed to England the coded results of these
last three attacks. "Dinghy" Young reported that his weapon
had exploded in contact with the dam, Martin radioed that
his had exploded fifty yards short, and Flight Lieutenant
Maltby believed that his bomb had also failed to breach the
Moehne Dam.

ONE MINUTE LATER, Guy Gibson's aircraft thundered over the
dam again, and an aweful, spinechilling sight met his eyes.
The centre of the dam had vanished -- it had rolled over,
and a tidal wave had pushed aside the thousands of tons of
masonry and was pounding down the valley. One German gunner
on the rest of the dam, but only one, was still firing.
Gibson swiftly called up Shannon and told him not to
attack.

The Moehne dam had ceased to exist. From the side of the
valley Clemens Koehler had watched, paralysed, as the
masonry wall had solemnly bulged and then burst with
terrible ferocity between the two valve-towers. A mighty
wave of water had spilled out of the breach and plunged to
the the valley floor, striking the ground with a colossal
crash -- a sight without parallel in most men's lives. The
remains of the power-house vanished in a fraction of a
second, and then the tidal wave settled down, the angry
vortices and whirlpools vanished, and a wall of water began
tearing down the moonlit valley at twenty feet a second,
ripping everything with it. Shortly afterwards, a cloud of
spray and water-vapour rose, and mercifully obliterated the
rest of this infernal spectacle from Koehler's sight.

At four minutes to one a.m., the 'phone rang for the
signals officer at Grantham. He listened briefly, then
shouted: "Gibson has signalled
NIGGER, Sir -- they've done it."

Gibson had already diverted his remaining aircraft to the
second main target, the Eder dam. This contained even more
water than the Moehne, 202 million tons, making it the
biggest artificial reservoir in Europe. This dam was 139
feet high, 1,310 feet long and built of masonry like the
Moehne dam. As Gibson's aircraft reached it, small rivers of
water were running out of the dam's overflow channels, so it
could not have been fuller. The only anti-aircraft guns on
this dam had been removed after the defeat at Stalingrad
five months before. It was virtually undefended. Only
sentries with rifles patrolled the road running along the
dam's crest.

At 1:32 a.m., the telephone rang in the local Air Raid
Defence controller's office. An officer in SS uniform
answered: "Lieutenant Saahr speaking."

"This is the Warnzentrale! There are several enemy
aircraft circling the Eder dam!"

An hour earlier, the local authorities in the valley
below the Moehne Dam had refused to believe the similar
warning telephoned to them by Clemens Koehler. But this SS
officer did not hesitate. He shouted to the Warnzentrale to
clear the line, and at once telephoned the SS unit closest
to the Eder Dam, the third Company of 603 Regional Defence
Batallion at Hemfurth. The duty corporal there confirmed
that there were three enemy aircraft circling overhead.

"I'll call you back in a couple of minutes," said Saahr.
"If an attack starts before then, sound the alarm!"

Then Saahr telephoned through to SS Colonel Burk, the
commanding officer of the SS Flak Training Regiment nearby,
and warned him that a flood disaster was imminent. Within
minutes, Colonel Burk had told one hundred men and lorries
to stand by.

Almost at once, Lieutenant Saahr telephoned him again,
and the news was even more alarming: "The local battalion
says the planes are releasing flares -- and they have
switched on searchlights!"

The roar of lorry engines and motorcycles on the grobund
mingled with the noise of aircraft engines in the air, as
the Germans prepared for the biggest flood-disaster
operation of the war.

IT HAD TAKEN Guy Gibson some time to find the Eder lake:
there was mist in the valleys, and this made each of them
look not unlike a reservoir from the air. When he found the
right valley he flicked on his microphone switch and called
up the other aircraft: "Can you see the target?"

Dave Shannon's voice came faintly into his earphones: "I
can't see anything -- I can't find the dam."

Gibson fired a red Verey light over the dam, and
Shannon's voice came immediately:

"Okay, I'm coming up."

Shannon was a perfectionist. At 1:39 a.m., he attempted
his first bombing approach but his bomb-aimer was not
satisfied and they circled back to the other end of the
lake. He tried again, but again the bomb run was not quite
right. On the third run-up, the bomb-aimer released the
special bomb: it bounced twice, and scored a direct hit on
the dam's narrow parapet. Sixty seconds ticked past as the
bomb sank, then a mighty explosion rent the air and a pillar
of water shot up hundreds of feet into the air, followed by
a blinding blue flash as the blast-waves shortcircuited the
60,000-volt power-lines leading across the valley from the
generator house.

But the dam was still standing.

The generator-house foreman, Meister Karl Albrecht, later
described: "At first we had assumed that the bombers were
only using the lake as an assembly point, as they had done
so often before. The first bomb fell at about half-past one,
but it did not damage the wall much, though it did cause
damage to the Power House No.1. I went to the No.2 Power
House, on the right-hand side of the valley by the dam.
There were two brilliant flares burning on the little island
between the two plants, presumably as an aiming guide for
the bombers.

"The aircraft continued to circle ..."

Gibson called up the second of the three Lancasters:
"Hello Z-Zebra -- you can go in now."

It was 1:50 a.m.. Squadron-Leader Henry Maudslay dived
his Lancaster steeply down over the castle which marked the
beginning of the bombing run at the far end of the lake, and
closed in towards the dam.

During their bombing trials a few days before, this
quiet, athletic English officer had totalled one of these
irreplaceable Lancasters when he had dropped the special
bomb from so low that the water had damaged the fuselage.
There appeared to be no defences on the Eder dam at all, but
luck seemed to be against him: as Z-Zebra thundered across
the moonlit lake, Gibson and his other pilots could see that
besides the dambusting bomb, there was some other large
object dangling from beneath the plane -- it must have been
damaged by the enemy defences on the flight out.

Something else must have been wrong, because Maudslay's
Lancaster released the spinning bomb far too late from the
callipers. The bomb volleyed into the Eder Dam's parapet at
250 miles an hour and blew up instantaneously, right beneath
the bomber that had just dropped it.

A few of the dam's huge masonry slabs were blown off the
parapet like confetti, and a yellow glare lit the whole
valley as bright as day for several seconds. Out of the
darkness, somebody's voice on the radiotelephone said
quietly what everybody was thinking, "He blew himself
up."

Guy Gibson called up the aircraft. There was no reply. He
tried again: "Z-Zebra, Z-Zebra, are you okay?"

This time, there was a faint, tired reply. "I think so,"
it said. "Stand by."

But the voice was very weak. Maudslay was doomed. His
radio operator performed one more duty. At three minutes
before two a.m. he sent back to England a coded wireless
signal signifying: "Special weapon released, overshot dam,
no apparent breach..." But that was the last that was ever
heard of this aircraft or its crew.

THIS LEFT ONLY one aircraft ready to attack. A third wave of
617 Squadron's aircraft was now invading German territory,
as an airborne reserve to fill in the gaps. But by 2 a.m.
there were more gaps than aircraft in this reserve: seven
minutes earlier, S-Sugar had exploded in mid-air over
Tilburg in Holland -- the other aircraft could not see why,
but German records suggest that it was flying so low that it
fouled electric power lines. Its captain, Canadian Pilot
Officer L.J. Burpee had just got married to an English girl,
and they had been hunting for a house near Scampton. Now she
was already a widow.

In any case, there was already a glow in the East where
the dawn was coming up. The last aircraft in Gibson's
immediate force, piloted by an Australian, Les Knight, swept
in towards the dam, made one dummy run, and then attacked,
using the flares that had been dropped beyond the dam as a
rough guide. Guy Gibson, flying alongside Knight and just
above him, saw the bomb bounce three times, roll up to the
dam wall, sink and detonate perfectly, throwing up an
eight-hundred-foot water-spout.

A huge hole suddenly appeared about thirty feet below the
dam's parapet, as though a giant fist had punched through
the masonry. Barnes Wallis's special four-ton bomb had
started a collapse that would push aside twenty-four
thousand tons of masonry.

Five minutes later, the telephone rang in SS-Colonel
Burk's office, waking him out of a fitful sleep. "This is
Lieutenant Saahr again, Herr Colonel! Arolson Post Office
has just phoned through a report from the 603 Regional
Defence Batallion. The dam has been destroyed. I have tried
to contact them myself, but all the lines are dead."

The villagers closest to the stricken dam needed no
telephone to know what had happened. A motorcyclist rode
through the main street of Affoldern, screaming at the top
of his voice, "The dam's been hit -- the water's coming.
Everybody out of the cellars!" Within seconds, the streets
were full of scores of people, clutching children and
suitcases and scrambling for the higher ground. There was a
noise like a hundred express trains coming from up the
valley -- 8,500 tons of water a second were cascading out of
the dam, and the breach was getting wider every moment.

As the people reached the higher ground, they turned
round and looked at Affoldern -- within minutes it had
vanished into the flood. The steel suspension bridge at
Hemfurth collapsed with an enormous rumble into the
torrent.

The villagers could hear the bellowing of cattle chained
and trapped in their stalls, and the screams of those people
who had not been able to escape in time.

Colonel Burk did not underestimate the size of the
catastrophe. Within minutes, he had telephoned emergency
flood warnings to the major city of Kassel, forty miles
away, and to the Luftwaffe's big airfield at Fritzlar. By
2:30 a.m., the Army Command at Kassel had alerted an
engineer battalion, and within half-an-hour troops were
being rushed by the lorry load to the disaster area.

At 4:15 a.m., a Major Emergency was proclaimed. The Royal
Air Force had succeeded in doing what the Germans had
believed to be impossible, and now the Germans were paying
the price.

*

It was at about this time, four in the morning, that
"Bomber" Harris, listening to the final signals filtering in
to No.5 Bomber Group headquarters at Grantham, finally said:
"Well, that's all we can do here. Let's go over to Scampton
and meet them as they come back."

His expression as he turned to the bomb's inventor was
softer than it had been earlier that night. "Can I give you
a lift, Mr Wallis?" he asked.

Wallis accepted gratefully, because Harris's black
limousine was one of the very few yet fitted with a heater
-- and the early hours were chilly.